GeForce 820M vs GeForce GT 340

Intro

Compare those specs to the GeForce GT 340, which makes use of a 40 nm design. nVidia has set the core frequency at 550 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM works at a frequency of 850 MHz on this model. It features 96 SPUs along with 32 Texture Address Units and 8 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 820M		15 Watts
GeForce GT 340		69 Watts
	Difference: 54 Watts (360%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the GeForce GT 340 should in theory be quite a bit superior to the GeForce 820M overall. (explain)

GeForce GT 340		54400 MB/sec
GeForce 820M		16000 MB/sec
	Difference: 38400 (240%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GT 340 is much (more or less 53%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce 820M. (explain)

GeForce GT 340		17600 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 820M		11504 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 6096 (53%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high screen resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GT 340 is a better choice, by a large margin. (explain)

GeForce GT 340		4400 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 820M		2876 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 1524 (53%)

Please note that the above 'benchmarks' are all just theoretical - the results were calculated based on the card's specifications, and real-world performance may (and probably will) vary at least a bit.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the max amount of data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the video card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics card can possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.